This invention relates to a process for purifying waste water, particularly pesticide-containing waste water, using active carbon.
Over the past few years, waste water purification processes have become increasingly known, in which biological breakdown and adsorption are combined an active carbon. The process is technically designed in such a manner that active carbon is added to the ventilated activated sludge reservoir. In a modern variant of this process, prepurification first of all takes place by flocculation and decantation. The waste water is then passed into large open reservoirs, which contain macroporous charcoal in the form of a fixed bed. In this fixed bed, aerobic micro-organisms form colonies. The process thus consists of a mechanical preliminary stage and the subsequent biological purification stage. According to DOS No. 2,109,022 it is necessary for high purification that the charcoal used has a surface of from 10 to at most 400 m.sup.2 /g. Active carbons accordingly have only a slight purification effect.
A substantial disadvantage of the known processes is that the active carbon is relatively quickly adsorptively saturated and exhausted and generally cannot be regenerated without loss of the adsorption capacity. In this case, the whole active carbon filling process must be renewed, which involves a large consumption of material and is thus not economically justifiable. The purification of waste water which contains pesticidal materials from pesticide production plants poses a particular problem. After purification, the residual concentration of pesticidal materials should be reduced to extremely low values.